Voxeo Talks

Have you checked out the Party Line application for Facebook that I wrote about a few weeks back?

Well, the folks at Equals have spent some time working on the application and listening to the feedback from users. They’ve made some changes to it and also clarified some of the usage terms. Here are the major changes:

• Removed the initial advertisement that people being called out had to listen to when they were put into a call. Callers now just get dropped immediately into the conference bridge so that you can start talking! Note that the person initiating the call still hears a brief ad while the service is connecting the other members of the call.

• Clarified in their FAQ that calls are at least for the initial rollout limited to a maximum of 15 minutes.

The team there at Equals is continuing to look at ways to improve the application and are definitely looking for feedback as well. If you haven’t checked it out, we encourage you to read our previous post and then simply get started using the Party Line application inside of Facebook.

We’d also note that Equals CEO Ajay Madhok recently gave an interview to The Social Times which has now been released as a podcast if you would like to know more about the company and what they are doing.

We’re pleased to see an application using our platform to bring voice inside of Facebook - and we look forward to seeing what they come up with next!

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Want to call somewhere and find out where your nearest Ethanol or biodiesel fuel stations are? Thinking about trying out biodiesel but you want to know how feasible it is to get fuel in your area? Well, just in time for Earth Day 2008 tomorrow, a member of our developer community, Mark Headd, has brought out “Project Green Phone” - a very cool voice mashup that integrates Voxeo Prophecy and StrikeIron web services… all through the use of the PHP, ECMAScript (JavaScript), VoiceXML and CCXML. Mark writes about the goals of his project:

• To make use of the Voxeo Prophecy platform, the premiere VoiceXML/CCXML platform for building voice applications (at least in my opinion).

• To code the application entirely in VoiceXML, CCXML, ECMAScript and PHP (that’s right, no database!).
• To integrate with SOAP-based web services to obtain data on E85 and Bi-Diesel station locations, and to do other cool stuff like send an SMS message from VoiceXML.
• To make use of interesting and unique audio files for prompts and to signal specific types of outcomes.
  

All in all it’s a very cool demonstration of integrating our application platform with web services using web programming languages. Mark’s blog has all the info, detailed instructions and code - you are free to download it and try it out yourself. While he focused on finding fuel stations near you, you can obviously modify his code to make use of other web services to obtain other information. (Do note that, like other mashups using phone numbers for location, it may not always work if the number you call in on is from a mobile phone, VoIP service or is in a different region via local number portability.)

Mark indicates he’ll be following this with more posts in the future and we’re looking forward to seeing what else he comes up with! Meanwhile, I’m going to install his app on my local Prophecy box and see where the nearest biodiesel station is to me…

[Standard disclaimer applies here… Voxeo Corp. has no connection to this code and can’t vouch for how it works - we just thought it was a cool use of our platform that we should point out… use at your own risk… if you run out of biodiesel on your way to the station, it’s not our fault… yadda, yadda, yadda… ]

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voxeo, voxeo prophecy, prophecy, mashups, voice mashups, voice, geolocation, earth day, environment, strikeiron, biodiesel, ethanol, applications, voicexml, ccxml,php

One of the fun aspects of giving your product away for free is that you really have no clue what people will wind up doing with it. So we were delighted to learn that our premise “Prophecy” product as well as industry standards we support like VoiceXML and grXML were included in a new book, “Mobile Web Development“, new available from Packt Publishing. (UPDATE: I subsequently learned that the author did contact us some time back about permission to use some screenshots, etc.)

The book’s author has a blog and in his entry today about the book writes this (I obviously added the bold emphasis):

Mobile Web Development shows you how to build a mobile presence for your web applications and sites. It covers targeting different mobile web browsers, sending and receiving SMS and MMS messages, accepting mobile payments, and developing voice- and touchtone-response systems.

The book illustrates every technique with practical examples, showing how to use these development methods in the real world. Along the way we show how an example pizza delivery business can use these methods to open up to the mobile web. The book is fast paced, yet touches upon relevant concepts. I had a great ride while I was reviewing the book. I was actually surprised at how fast the book moved - covering important topics in just enough detail, and moving on to the next!

There is a whole lot of technologies I covered in the book. The examples are done in PHP with XHTML Mobile Profile. But I also covered: AJAX, Wireless CSS, WAP 2.0, Tera WURFL, MyMobileWeb, Mobile Web Toolkit, Image Server, GAIA Image Transcoder, HAWHAW , ready.mobi, Nokia’s Mobile Internet Toolkit , SMIL, Voxeo’s Prophecy server, VoiceXML (VXML), grXML, Frost library, WALL, WURFL, SMS, MMS, mobile payment gateways, mobile widgets, Mobile AJAX, Android, Google Gears, and Dojo Offline.

The blog entry goes on to talk more about what the book offers developers. It sounds like a great book and I’m looking forward to seeing a copy (since I actually have no idea what he said about us!). We do see the whole mobile space as a huge growth area and welcome developers to look at using either our on-premise Prophecy or our hosted Evolution platform to build their apps. (Check out the docs available at either of those links!)

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books, mobile web development, nirav mehta, voxeo, prophecy, voicexml, vxml, grXML, mobile